The evolution of the Formula 1 rivalry | Frankel’s Insight

And for those who like their stories more slow burn than wham bam, perhaps this season’s battle for the Drivers’ Championship between Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri and now also Max Verstappen is shaping up to be one of the greats. What’s fascinating is that the McLaren drivers have both been so unfailingly polite about each other all year, yet you simply don’t get to be that good without recognising where the threat to what you want more than anything else in the world is coming from.

And, often as not, and certainly in this case, that threat has come from the other side of the pit garage. Sooner or later, this season or next, everything that’s been bubbling away beneath the surface is going to boil over, and when it does you’ll never put the lid back on that pot again.

To see what I mean, you may recall a photograph taken in the pitlane at Estoril on 21^st September 1986. It features Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, all sat on the pit wall together because even at that late stage in the season, all were title contenders.

It’s all very well natured — a picture of content no less — the only sign of possible dissent being that while Prost, Mansell and Piquet are all happy to put their arms around each other, Senna, at the time easily the least experienced and junior of the three, sits with both hands by his side.

Still, there they all were. Yet within a couple of years there probably wasn’t an amount of money in the world that would have persuaded them to sit together in such a picture of mutual harmony again. That tends to be what happens when one alpha male gets in the way of another alpha male doing what he set out to do. Let alone four.

But it can work. Stirling Moss never fell out with any team-mate, largely because all bar one knew they’d never beat him on talent alone. Talking of which, I well remember Tony Brooks, whose talent was both rare and special, telling me he sincerely believed he was as “quick as anyone out there” before pausing for half a second and saying, “apart from Stirling of course.”

But even the Boy Wonder was happy to play a supporting role to Juan Fangio at Mercedes in 1955, and despite scarcely being able to converse, remained friends for life.

I am reminded, too, how loyally Gilles Villeneuve supported Jody Scheckter in his 1979 title bid and, more poignantly, how the ultra-fast and experienced Ronnie Peterson had done the same for Mario Andretti the year before, because he recognised the role the American had played in getting Lotus into a position where it had a potentially Championship-winning car and thought it simply the right way to behave.

Of course, for the first half of the 75 years that Formula 1 has had a World Championship, you tended not to see one driver take another out, or push him off the track because everyone knew the possible consequences of such actions, not just for your opposite number but for you too.

In short, unless you had a death wish, the sort of moves we saw Michael Schumacher make on Damon Hill at Adelaide in 1994 and Estoril against Jacques Villeneuve were best avoided.

Drivers were more gentlemanly, too, and tended to sort out their differences in private. I know, for instance, of two absolutely top drivers that Stirling cared for, not at all because of what he regarded as their at times unacceptable conduct while racing. And I’d not dream of breaking his confidence now, even though all three of them are long gone.

But in more recent years, drivers have felt more free to express their feelings in their actions as Schumacher did, and indeed as Prost did to Senna at Suzuka in 1989, a compliment repaid at the same track a year later.

That sort of internecine rivalry is rarely possible these days, if for no other reason than because a top driver at a team simply won’t allow another to join — the only way it can happen is if two drivers with huge potential not quite fully established join the same team, as per Norris and Piastri.

Can you see them working harmoniously together for years to come? Me neither; it just doesn’t work that way. Prost left McLaren, as did Alonso after being beaten by a rookie Lewis Hamilton in 2007. Sebastian Vettel left Red Bull at the end of the 2014 season after being made to look less than God-like by Daniel Ricciardo.

More recently, there have been fewer great rivalries because dominant teams have tended to have one dominant driver too. It is fairly amazing to think that there have been just four F1 World Champions in the last 15 seasons, precisely half the number there were for the 15 before that.

So, the lesson to be learned here is that all good things come to an end, real rivalries in F1 sooner than most these days. We should enjoy them while we can.

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Images courtesy of Getty Images.